SIGIL EMPLOYEES FIRED!

Flunkie · Post by **Flunkie** » Tue May 15, 2007 3:32 pm

At 4:30 yesterday they were told to meet outside, then many fired/layed off, what ever you want to call it. The confirmation was made by at least one former employee. Brad's nowhere to be found, he wasn't present at the firing. A confirmation news release is supposed to be out today at some point, though where and how this official release will come out isn't known.

Flunkie · Post by **Flunkie** » Tue May 15, 2007 3:38 pm

Quote:
Hello Everyone,

Today I would like to formally announce that SOE has acquired the assets of Sigil Games Online, including Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. As a part of this acquisition, we are bringing on approx 50 people from Sigil in order to insure that Vanguard continues to grow. SOE is dedicated to making sure that Vanguard is well taken care of and that we provide the same level of service we do for our other titles. In the near future we will come out with a publishing plan that will largely be driven by the strong player community that Vanguard has already built up. We plan on supporting Vanguard for many years to come, and you can expect many content updates as part of your subscription. Down the line we will of course be coming out with new expansion packs, but right now the focus is on making sure Vanguard is running the way it should be.

We are also officially opening up forums. In the past, our deal with Sigil didn't allow for this, but as with our other games we fill this is an important part of communicating with the playerbase. You can expect a strong presence from our community team as well as the development team members. While we realize that Sigil had said they wouldn't open up general forums, at SOE we fill this hampers our efforts to communicate effectively with the players. We will continue to support the fansites in a big way, and will be contacting many of them directly to discuss what this change means. By no means do we want to lose the strong fansite support by making this change, but we do think it's important to have a forum for players to communicate directly with SOE.

A few other items I wanted to mention

1. Brad McQuaid will be consultant to SOE as a creative advisor for Vanguard. Dave Gilbertson will be the person directly responsible for the day-to-day management of both the Sigil Carlsbad office as well as Vanguard.

2. We do not plan on making any major changes to Vanguard. Any changes are going to come from the team itself. We aren't mandating any big changes to the game. We've learned a thing or two with our experiences with the NGE and don't plan on repeating mistakes from the past and not listening to the players.

3. We do plan on spending a lot of time cleaning up legacy issues with Vanguard and making sure the game's performance improves.

By way of comparison, this team is approx. the same size as the EQ2 team and I feel like that team has done an amazing job improving EQ2 since it's launch. We intend to do the same thing for Vanguard and it is our hope that the players feel like we're doing right by them.

Flunkie · Post by **Flunkie** » Tue May 15, 2007 3:39 pm

So not everyone was fired, probably about half.

Kulaf · Post by **Kulaf** » Tue May 15, 2007 3:47 pm

The actual developers are probably the people that retained their jobs. The people with jobs that SOE already has in place probably got the axe. Hopefully all of the employees that were let go get some kind of severance package.

And honestly.......trying to paint Brad in a bad light is in poor taste. He managed to work out a deal where half of his employees retained their job in an aquisition.......anyone who has been through one will tell you that is pretty incredible. I suppose Brad could have just stuck to his guns and everyone could have sung sea chanties as the ship went down......but this strikes be as the better scenario.

Flunkie · Post by **Flunkie** » Tue May 15, 2007 3:50 pm

Supposedly some developers got the axe. I'm pretty sure they kept the creative talent, probably not the marketing, support staff, or GM's though. I'd be surprised if they kept the building, it's pretty big for only 50 people.

Bahd Zoolander · Post by **Bahd Zoolander** » Tue May 15, 2007 5:11 pm

I heard around 60 people were let go which leaves about 30 at Sigil or being offered jobs by SOE, it's not clear which happened.

It appears that Sony bought Vanguard but not Sigil as a whole since that would come with a ton of debt.

It's a mess.

Post by **Ddrak** » Tue May 15, 2007 6:02 pm

Makes sense - Sony wants the IP, not the debt. They pay Brad a bunch of cash to sell out and screw his creditors. He doesn't care too much about his chances of financing a new game (as they're pretty much shot anyway) so takes the deal. Investors in Sigil get the shaft while management gets a golden parachute.

High value employees are retained with a 1-2 year contract that has business goals attached to bonuses. SoE may or may not keep the building - it's pretty irrelevant because building rent/rates is far less than salaries.

Standard corporate buyout.

Dd

Minute · Post by **Minute** » Tue May 15, 2007 7:16 pm

Zero surprise here. The day I saw SoE's name anywhere near Sigil I knew it was all in the toilet.

Flunkie · Post by **Flunkie** » Wed May 16, 2007 10:16 am

It's going around that Brad hadn't been showing up for work very much for the past 8 months. Seems hard to believe, unless he was in the throws of a great depression over VG, which doesn't seem hard to believe at all.

Post by **Ddrak** » Wed May 16, 2007 10:46 am

http://www.f13.net/index.php?itemid=561#more

Needs a good "bitterness" filter on it ("only shipping Velious" is a bad thing??), but gives a sense of the ex-Sigil folks thoughts.

Dd

jookkor · Post by **jookkor** » Wed May 16, 2007 3:41 pm

Flunkie wrote:It's going around that Brad hadn't been showing up for work very much for the past 8 months. Seems hard to believe, unless he was in the throws of a great depression over VG, which doesn't seem hard to believe at all.

maybe he was just on a coke bender?

Flunkie · Post by **Flunkie** » Wed May 16, 2007 7:16 pm

You might not be too far off, there's some more crap floating around that Brad may be in some kind of rehab. I find that hard to believe though, 8 months is a long time.

The f13 interview is interesting. I met Darrin McPherson and some of the other class development team around October 2005. I was there on a tour with a couple of friends and they took us out to lunch. We talked about class stuff and quite a bit about EQ. Mostly I brought up EQ and wanted to know if they were going to have contested content, and a lot of the class abilities that made EQ interesting. I liked the ability to solo, I liked AE groups, I like quad kiting, etc. So what did they think? Hated it. They seemed to have little interest in what we three veteran EQ players thought was fun or not fun in EQ. Instead, they went on and on about their elite EQ guilds and various exploits they had worked at one time or another. Their vision of what is fun is different from the collective. To some extent, they knew they were going to put out something that most people weren't going to enjoy playing. I think they built VG on the concept that Elite guilds will flock to VG and abandon WoW, EQ, EQ2, etc. Not all players, just the elite. Players like themselves...

I'll give this much to Darrin, he seemed sure of himself and the vision for the classes. I really got the feeling that they were building a game that they loved to play themselves. Darrin wasn't the only guy totally in love with the game at the time. Another class designer, nice guy, drove all the way up to Carlsbad from Mexico every weekday to work ten hours, plus another eight hours on Saturdays. Including commutes, that guy had to be putting in 70-80 hours away from home per week. He was married with kids! These guys were hard core players. I remember telling my friends after we drove away that I couldn't hack working for a game developer. It sounds good on paper, sounds like fun, but although I like playing games, I couldn't put in that kind of time for any job, I'd go crazy. Maybe that's what happened to Brad?

I don't know how the final product came out because I pretty much knew I didn't like the concept after Beta 1.5 (my friends and I started just after 1.5 started). I have posted regarding Microsoft before, there was a weekend in December 2005 or January 2006 where Microsoft let some college kids into the game from Seattle or some place up in Washington. It was a mess. They laughed at the game, cussed people out and generally raised hell. A Microsoft rep appologized on the VG forum, but it was only a few months later that Microsoft pulled out. Makes total sense.

I feel sorry for the people at Sigil, everyone I met was really hospitable. It's too bad that they suffered from bad management. If the managers had been more open to what they're own employees were saying, then they might also have listened to the hundreds of beta testers that told them the truth about the game a thousand times before the release date was ever contemplated.

Post by **Ddrak** » Wed May 16, 2007 10:39 pm

I don't know how the final product came out because I pretty much knew I didn't like the concept after Beta 1.5 (my friends and I started just after 1.5 started).

Actually, the final game is pretty good as far as concept/design goes. There's minor incompleteness but certainly not enough to make it difficult to actually find something to do from lv1-50.

I just don't get the continued negativity from all quarters on the game - especially from people who really haven't tried it since release (not you in particular, Flunkie, just in general). I see a bunch of people just itching to dump on any bad news they can hear about the game, but not willing to actually try it to see if their second or third hand ideas are actually true.

It's almost like people want it to fail, just to be vindictive or something?

Dd

Kulaf · Post by **Kulaf** » Thu May 17, 2007 12:06 am

Well Flunkie has been pretty much anti-Vanguard from the beginning:

viewtopic.php?t=7672&highlight=vanguard

Funny how now he admits he didn't play after beta 1.5 now.....but he was arguing with me about the game and I was in beta 3........after the game was really working.

Whenever people seem to leave an MMO they are driven to bolster that decesion by bashing the game they used to play. I guess that in some way makes them feel better about their decesion......I don't really know.

Vanguard is still a good game......that is suffering from some really bad performance issues. Personally I still think the devs at Sigil didn't know how to optimize the Unreal engine texturally and hopefully someone at SOE can step in and make some major engine optimizations.

Lanlaiely · Post by **Lanlaiely** » Thu May 17, 2007 5:06 am

The thing that really gets me about the performance issues is that this game has a higher computer performance requirement than any other game that I've ever played. I was so excited about Vanguard coming out that I actually bought a brand new computer. Then the game didn't perform. It was very disappointing.

Yeah, I do understand that all games have issues at release. But there were "bugged" quests that were bugged because they weren't finished. When they were finally finished, my character was too high level to be able to get a group to finish it (I.E. The map quest in KE).

I do think that Vanguard is a great game and really has alot of potential to become a greater game. But the early release is really what killed it imo. Releasing a game that was 65% done and passing it off as complete was just a recipe for disaster. This outcome isn't at all surprising.

Gorre McGuinness · Post by **Gorre McGuinness** » Thu May 17, 2007 6:03 am

Minute wrote:Zero surprise here. The day I saw SoE's name anywhere near Sigil I knew it was all in the toilet.

That is a really uninformed comment. The game would have never seen the light (and it probably shouldn't have) if SOE didn't bail out Sigils ass after Microsoft dumped them. Prior to this weeks announcement, SOE had no influence on the game other than to provide the hosting/infrastructure and to lend a few devs.

The game was "in the toilet" way before SOE got involved in the picture. Anyone who played Beta and saw the changes over the year or so before it was released could have told you what a hunk of crap it was. To blame anyone other than Brad for this shit pile of a game is flat out stupid.

Go read the interview on f13.net. Very enlightening.

http://f13.net/index.php?itemid=561#more

Fallakin Kuvari · Post by **Fallakin Kuvari** » Thu May 17, 2007 8:09 am

Gorre McGuinness wrote: That is a really uninformed comment. The game would have never seen the light (and it probably shouldn't have) if SOE didn't bail out Sigils ass after Microsoft dumped them.

Talk about uninformed comments.

Minute · Post by **Minute** » Thu May 17, 2007 9:54 am

Yeah sign me up for the anti-VG bandwagon. Why? Because they sold out almost from the get go. I mean the before the game was ever really released I saw them selling out to SoE in the way of support. I knew it was the death nail being planeted.

You know like 50% of the reason it was going to be cool was because it was a "stick it to the man" campaign. Brad split when they started screwing crap up at Verant and supposedly was going to full circle that which made the original EQ great.

He petered out and caved. And who knows, maybe the well was dry and dude had no other options but that is what happens when you sell your soul to the devil. It always ends up biting you right in the ass end.

Oh well... F SoE, F Brad, and F his vision. Pathetic looser

Flunkie · Post by **Flunkie** » Thu May 17, 2007 10:28 am

Kulaf wrote:Well Flunkie has been pretty much anti-Vanguard from the beginning:

viewtopic.php?t=7672&highlight=vanguard

Funny how now he admits he didn't play after beta 1.5 now.....but he was arguing with me about the game and I was in beta 3........after the game was really working.

No, you're wrong there, I did actually get in the game a couple of times after 1.5. I got in when Microsoft dumped the game several months later, and about September/October 2006, I checked it out again. I wouldn't call myself anti-Vanguard, more like I didn't think it was going to succeed and I didn't like the concepts for many of the game mechanics. But most of all, there wasn't much of a hook in it. I played through 15-20 levels early on and only a few levels later. I never felt like the game was compelling. I think everyone hopes for the feeling like things were back in EQ around 2001-2003. There's a realization that it isn't going to happen again I guess. I wish Sigil had put out an EQ killer, I would have been looking forward to playing everyday if they had. I didn't think VG would crash and burn, I figured that it would probably end up appealing to hard core players like the developers themselves. That's what, maybe 400K or so across the world? And frame rates are no concern to me anymore, I should post a picture of my new system. I get about 10.5K on 3DMark06.

Did I lie when I said be prepared to be disappointed?

Post by **Ddrak** » Thu May 17, 2007 11:07 am

Right now, VG is a pretty good casual game. Lots of quests (at least as many as WoW), stunning scenery and a pretty involved back-story.

It's definitely had a bad start, and needs something to pick it up. What a lot will depend on is how the raiding content works out. Now that I've read that there isn't a scripting engine in the back end, I'm a little concerned that it will be a little too cookie-cutter. Still in "wait and see" mode, but my playtime has been killed from external issues atm.

Dd